By Julie Burchill
November 4, 2005
Originally published as a column in The Times of London.
I've always distrusted both a) cretins who believe in the inherent goodness of children, and b) people who write poems. So imagine my delight when I read in the singularly excellent newsletter of the Middle East commentator Tom Gross about a piece of verse published in the new collection "Great Minds," a collection of poems by 11- to 18-year-olds, which is to be distributed in schools throughout Britain.
Jewish organizations here are quite rightly quite upset about inclusion of a poem by one "Gideon Taylor," a boy of 14, which includes the lines: "Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere, filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces." Obviously not a young man who believes that less is more, Master Taylor goes for the big finale: "Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber where they will sleep in their manger. I'll be happy Jews have died."
In its defense, the publisher of the book says that the poem states at one point "I am Adolf Hitler." But this has not convinced the hundreds of Jews and Christians -- but interestingly, not Muslims -- who have seen fit to complain, nor the young Labor MP Louise Ellman, who while notoriously tough-minded and cool-headed, has called the piece an incitement to racial hatred.
Rather creepily, "Gideon Taylor" is the only contributor in the entire book whose school or location is not included. Even creepier, the country's education minister, Ruth Kelly - a devout Catholic who is a member of the extremist cult Opus Dei, which astoundingly has an even more shameful history of anti-Semitism and Nazi-helping than the Church
generally, not to mention whipping themselves for kicks -- has yet to respond. And respond she should.
And the publishers should do what the Holocaust Educational Trust has asked them to do: issue a formal apology and remove the poem. Because one does not have to be a paranoid Jew -- or in my case, a paranoid "Jew-lover," as many correspondents have seen fit to expose me as over the years -- to believe that there is no way a poem which stated "Blacks are here, blacks are there, blacks are almost everywhere" or "I'll be happy Muslims have died" would be in a book handed out like sweeties from a pedophile to the nation's schoolchildren, even if it was made clear that the verse was written from the warped perspective of a white supremacist.
Once more, Jews are on the end of the hobnailed-boot while other minorities are handled with kid gloves. The idea seems to be that because they can "pass" for white, or because the Holocaust was "a long time ago," liberties may be taken with their feelings which no one would dream of doing to other, louder minorities. Can we trust the teaching profession not to have the usual quotient of anti-Semites among them? I don't see why. What's to stop them using a piece of writing like this as a starting point for peddling their own poisonous views?
In a country -- mine! -- where a Palestinian physics teacher recently terrified a group of children by telling them that he knew how to make bombs and would blow up their school bus if they didn't behave, this isn't quite as far-fetched as it may seem.
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